SSD performance review - OCZ and Samsung drives on test
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 29 Jul 2008

For some time the biggest problem of memory business was very slow increase in performance. Memory capacity doubled every 18 to 24 months following the Moore’s law, but performance grew by mere 4-6% yearly. This effect is present in both system memory and storage, but it seems that solid state drives might radically increase the performance of storage devices.For months now we were very interested how SSD drives would turn up to be - wether they're really as fast as rumours said and how does that relate to real-life performance. So, here we go!

If you ever saw RaptorX during Windows boot you know how fast the head moves. Though impressively fast, it is the slowest part of any computer. The mechanical parts of conventional hard disk drives introduce non uniform access. The latency depends on the position of the head and position of the data that is requested, while the write and read speeds depend on the position of the data on the plate. Solid state drives are based on flash memory chips and have no mechanical parts. Due to the architecture similar to system memory the access time and transfer rates are constant. There are other benefits like low power consumption and higher shock resistance, but on the other hand these drives are still very expensive, relatively low capacity and a limited number of rewrite cycles. The latter sounds bad, but is nothing end users should worry about since there are ways of dealing with this problem.

We got our hands on a Samsung 2.5” 32GB SATA solid state drive, as well as OCZ's 64GB SATAII drive. Since Samsung's drive was the first SSD we got our hands on, we were keen to see if the rumors about superior performance were true. We cloned one of our RaptorX drives to these solid state drives and ran some test to compare the two.

A couple of pictures: